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The Fedora Project has released the final version of Fedora 22.
The big news with this release is that the Fedora project actually managed to stick pretty close to its proposed schedule. Fedora 22 arrives just one week later than the original proposal, but what's a week after month long delays that happened throughout the last couple of release cycles.
It would seem that the recent top-down restructuring of the Fedora project is working, at least in terms of development time. The Fedora release announcement characterizes Fedora 22 as "Fedora 21 after it'd been to college, landed a good job, and kept its New Year's Resolution to go to the gym on a regular basis." I would hesitate to endorse the gym bit since I found this release a little sluggish, but it builds on the very nice base that was Fedora 21 and brings in all the latest packages.
That new structure in the project means that Fedora 22 is available in three "flavors": Cloud, Server, and Workstation. All three build out from the same base, adding packages relevant to the individual use case. Although I tested both the Server and Workstation options, I'll primarily be focusing on the Workstation variant since that's the desktop version most users will want.
Perhaps the most interesting change is that Fedora 22 no longer uses Yum to manage packages. That may comes as a shock to some since, if you're like me, the first thing you think of when you think of Fedora is Yum. Yum has been deprecated in this release and replaced by DNF and hawkey for package management.
The good news for long-time Fedora users is that DNF is very close to totally command-line compatible with Yum. And Yum is even aliased to DNF, so you can still type "yum install mypackage", and, once its done telling you Yum is deprecated, it will install as always. But that will change in future releases so you're better off getting used to typing "dnf install mypackage".
In short, yes, Yum is gone, but oddly, you may not even notice.
The installation process hasn't changed much in this release. I've criticized the Fedora installer in the past so I won't repeat that here except to wonder, once again, why confirmation buttons are at the top of the windows. I can't think of another piece of software on any platform that does this.
The most visible change in this release is a version bump for GNOME. Fedora has long served as one of the best showcases for GNOME Shell and Fedora 22 is no exception. This release updates GNOME to 3.16, which is notable for its new, lighter theme and revamped notifications system.
The first thing you'll notice when you fire up Fedora 22 for the first time is that GNOME's default dark look has been toned down a bit. Ever since GNOME 3.x debuted its default (and not very customizable) theme has been all about black. That's subtly changed in this release with many elements moving to a lighter shade of grey. It may not sound like much, but the result is much easier on the eyes, especially all the white text against a dark background, which is now considerably less garish.
The notifications system has been revamped in this release as well, gone are the bottom of the screen notifications that always covered up key elements of the app I was using (particularly terminal windows). Instead notifications have been moved to the top, center of the screen where they're easier to see and dismiss. The notifications history view has been rolled into the calendar menu item in the top bar.
It's worth noting too that there appears to be a Fedora 22-only element to the notifications. In Fedora long running Terminal processes will pop up a notification when they finish, which is helpful because it lets you, for example, start compiling something which you can then send to the background and move on to something else. You'll get a notification when you compile (or other task) is complete.
There are some apps that still need a tray-style menu -- I'm looking at you Skype -- and for those there is still a legacy tray menu that acts like a drawer and tucks away off screen in the bottom left corner when not in use.
The new notifications system in GNOME 3.16 is nice, but it unfortunately appears to have come at the cost of the media player controls, which are nowhere to be found in the top bar in this release. The plan is to add those back in GNOME 3.18, but I couldn't find a way to use them in this release.
As with the last couple of GNOME releases there's an option to run GNOME atop Wayland and support for Wayland continues to improve. In fact, the GNOME project says Wayland support is "approaching its final stages", but in my limited testing it remains too unstable for day-to-day use.
GNOME 3.16 is also notable for adding two new "preview" apps, one for ebooks (currently limited to comics in .cbr and other digital formats, though .epub support is in the works) and Calendar. Fedora doesn't ship with either of the new apps installed, opting to stick with Evolution for calendaring and, well, nothing for ebooks (the very popular Calibre is in the repos). Both of the GNOME apps are in the repos if you'd like to test them out. They're both simplistic and a little buggy at the moment, but Calendar shows some promise of filling what I consider the biggest hole in the default GNOME software stack that most distros use.
Speaking of the rest of the GNOME stack, it has, as you would expect been updated in Fedora 22. Fedora stick with the tradition GNOME software for the most part, Evolution for email and calendar, Firefox for web browsing, Rhythmbox for music and Shotwell for organizing your photos. Then there's Nautilus, the default file browser which has about 30 percent of the features it once had. The good news with Nautilus in this release is that the delete key will once again delete files (the last version changed this to ctrl-delete). To counter the possibility that by pressing "delete" you actually meant, "no, keep it", there's a new, easy to spot undo option.
GNOME is of course not the only way to run Fedora 22 Workstation. There are spins for just about every popular desktop environment. It's worth noting that the Xfce spin has made the rather significant upgrade to Xfce 4.12, which brings some very nice changes to the Xfce desktop. Similarly, the KDE spin gets updated to the latest Plasma 5 desktop environment, which features the new "Breeze" theme for KDE.
Other Fedora-specific improvements in this release include the usual Fedora developer tools updates. Fedora shows developers the love with the latest version of popular web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django. Perl, Python, PHP and most other popular programming languages are similarly updated.
The Server and Cloud versions of this release gain some added support for popular container and deployment solutions like Vagrant and Project Atomic, which is designed to deploy and manage Docker containers.
By and large Fedora 22 is a welcome update. The chief problem I encountered with Fedora 22 is that it felt a bit sluggish next to Ubuntu. Whether that's the result of GNOME or something more on Fedora's end is difficult to say, though anecdotally, running Fedora 22 alongside Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu GNOME felt faster. Suffice to say if you're used to Ubuntu 15.04 with Unity or something even lighter and snappier, Fedora with GNOME 3.16 will probably feel a little on the slow side.
Relative to Fedora 21 though this release makes for a very welcome update and the fact that Fedora appears to be back on track with an every six months release schedule is good news for Fedora fans.
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